UNITED STATES
FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION
In Re: )
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WIRELESS BROADBAND FORUM )
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)
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Pages: 1 through 254
Place: Washington, D.C.
Date: May 19, 2004
HERITAGE REPORTING CORPORATION
Official Reporters
1220 L Street, N.W., Suite 600
Washington, D.C. 20005-4018
(202) 628-4888
1
Before the
FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION
Washington, D.C. 20554
In Re: )
)
WIRELESS BROADBAND FORUM )
)
)
Commission Meeting Room
FCC Building
445 12th Street, S.W.
Washington, D.C.
Wednesday
May 19, 2004
The parties met, pursuant to notice.
BEFORE: HONORABLE MICHAEL POWELL
Chairman
APPEARANCES:
Heritage Reporting Corporation
(202) 628-4888
1
P R O C E E D I N G S
(9:35 a.m.)
MS. SEIDEL: Good morning. I'm Cathy Seidel and I'm the Deputy Chief of the Wireless Bureau. I'd like to welcome you all to the Commission's Boardband Forum. Today's forum will focus on three critical issues relating to broadband wireless services. Specifically, we'll talk a little bit about what wireless broadband is, what wireless broadband will be and, perhaps, most importantly, what wireless broadband should be. We've brought together business, technology and government leaders in what is sure to be an open, informative and lively discussion.
As outline in the agenda, today's forum will be comprised of four panels, each of which will be moderated by one of our commissioners, each of whom has graciously agreed to be a part of this effort. These panels will explore technological development, consumer demand, barriers to further success and expectations for the future.
To ensure a healthy discussion, we have set aside time for questions from the audience at the end of each panel discussion. In addition to the panels, we will be setting up demonstration rooms from noon to 5:00 p.m. so that everyone can view some of the key technological developments in the wireless broadband space.
With the recent creation of the Broadband Division within the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, under the able leadership of Joel Taubenblatt, the Commission's vision of wireless broadband continues to develop and sharpen. We believe that this forum today will support and help inform the work of the division and outline options for the Commission that will have a positive impact on long-term wireless broadband development.
This point will be brought home later today by the Wireless Bureau's Chief, John Muleta, who will fight his own unique perspective of the wireless marketplace and the strives the Bureau is making to promote wireless broadband.
As many of you are aware, conducting a forum such as this requires a heavy amount of behind‑the‑scenes work. I'd like to thank the work of staff in the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau as well as the Office of Engineering and Technology for the detailed work that was done to make this forum a reality. Specifically, I'd like to thank Chelsea Fallon, who's probably running around here somewhere, who has really been the primary organizer for today's event and really has gone above and beyond the call of duty to make today's event a meaningful experience for each of its participants.
Before we get started with our panel discussions, Chairman Michael Powell has agreed to kick off today's events by discussing his vision for wireless broadband. As you know, Chairman Powell has consistently championed wireless technology and innovative broadband services in particular as a means to achieve ubiquitous and affordable telecommunication services nationwide. As chairman of the FCC, he truly has his finger on the pulse of wireless broadband and is singularly positioned to help ensure the continued development of wireless broadband for the benefit of individuals, commercial entities, public safety entities and the community and beyond. So, without further ado, please join me in welcoming Chairman Powell.
(Applause.)
CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you, Cathy. That was a great introduction. She's not press agent. Very nicely done.
I want to the opportunity today to welcome all of you here to the FCC for this very important forum on broadband and, particularly, the promise that wireless holds for bringing the great benefits of broadband to all Americans. It seemed to me, walking in here today, I don't need any more graphic representation of broadband than looking at our narrow band security system to get people into this room. So that's our own graphic representation of the value that we're here to talk about today.
We have been talking about, as a community, broadband for years now. The recognition of the internet, the recognition of the promise that it holds for America and world citizens everywhere, but, as we move into this year, we really begin to see the intensifying recognition at all levels of government the promise that broadband holds for any nation that hopes to remain competitive and globally significant in the world of the information age and the world of the future. And that recognition is punctuated by our leaders increasingly setting out ambitious goals for this nation to reach.
The President of the United States recently talked about wanting broadband availability to all Americans by 2007, a truly bold and ambitious goal that's going to be difficult to meet, but we're able to meet. But it only will be met by the use of every possible tool in our broadband tool kit to get there. And it will be critical that wireless a major role in our ability to provide these benefits to the American consumer.
This is, as we often say, the central communication policy objective of the era. It's more than talk now and it's time for action and these forums are unique and important way to bring together critical communities to identify issues, to develop solutions and highlight important questions for government as it develops a spectrum policy that's respectful and efficient and productive for the broadband goals that we hope to achieve.
It is becoming more clearly focused what the benefits to a nation are of a constructive broadband policy and a broadband success. The American consumer we have a simple goal. We want to be able to provide this critical plug into an information appliance in an information age to every single American no matter where that American chooses to set up their family and live and to do so at affordable rates so that it is something that is for all of us regardless of our sociodemographic class. That issue has always proven to be difficult and sometimes impenetrable using the technologies of the past. For a hundred years, we have hauled copper wire over a mountain and through rivers and through valleys and over poles to try to reach this objective using a single technology. But that's what holds so much promise as we move into the future. We're able to use other technologies that will make that challenge more addressable.
A satellite cares very little about those demographic difference. Wireless can bridge distances that wire line functions can't. Wireless has unique opportunities for interactivity and mobility that other technologies don't. So, as we begin to sort of put this together for consumers, we see wireless as a critical component to that. I think, also, we begin to recognize anybody who cares about the economic well-being of their nation has begun to see the critical value of investing in broadband infrastructure and information technologies.
The United States has been able to steadily increase its global and its economic productivity almost exclusively because of its continuing willingness to invest in information technologies. Indeed, last year the United States had extraordinary productivity growth at the end of the year attributable directly to our investments in internet and information technologies of the '90s. If the United States is going to maintain its ability grow its economy, I think the continued proliferation of broadband technologies with wireless playing a critical part are key to that solution.
Productivity and growth are what we are about to make our generation better for our children and that's how daunting and important that task will be. And safety and security, as we all have come to be aware, in the post-911 world, we understand that we're vulnerable. We're not blessed as much we once were by geography. We can't take for granted the safety and security that we've come to enjoy in our generation and we understand that as an economy moves into an information age, its dependence, its vital dependence on critical information infrastructure becomes deepened and, as it becomes deepened, indeed, we become both benefitted but more vulnerable to problems in that network.
We have a historic opportunity as we engineer networks for next great era of communications to be cognizant of the need for safety and security at the front end of the engineering problem. It's important to be thinking about first responders and public safety now not later. It's important to be talking about how to secure networks and encrypt them and protect them from those who would rather do you harm or gain access to information inappropriately. It's important to have that up front.
To often, I think, in public policy, we often are working on those things on the back end of a deployment or we're bolting them on at the end. Let's be cognizant of them at the front end for the good of our citizens.
Wireless, again, as I have said, is vital. And I'll put it this way, to me and in my mind, one of the great ways to achieve the benefits that we're talking about is we can't rest on any single technology. I will give anyone a platform who has a broadband platform, who has the possibility, the opportunity, the entrepreneurial spirit to bring it to the market and bring it to deploy it to consumers. This is not an agenda just for a phone company, just for a cable company, just for a big wireless company. It's also a form for entrepreneurs and innovators and radical creators of new goods and services. And it's the Commission's mission to try to drive any platform that can deliver these services and deliver them effectively.
For 100 years, if I were to characterize the great regulatory difficulty, it's because we always had one wire. We had one wire to the home and because of that one wire you had enormous difficulties of monopoly control, bottle-neck facilities, the pricing of those facilities, how to get that one wire to every home in the United States. We have a historic opportunity here to not repeat that world. We have the opportunity for not one. We're clearly going to have two, DSL and KL modem are well on their well, but the holy grail is when you get to three. Magical things happen in competitive markets when there are three. Magical things happen when there is real choice and pressures for innovation. And we are looking. We want your poster up here for the third great access and, indeed, the fourth or fifth for the American consumer. And we all know that wireless rest somewhere there in that solution to bring that competitive world and take pressure off the regulatory environment for upgrading the market benefits that that dynamic can produce and we're already beginning to see it.
I don't need to catalog for this community the explosive growth in everything from Wi-Fi technologies to wireless internet service provision that is popping up in rural America, particularly, all over the country. We're beginning to see greater uses of wireless mobile broadband products such as EVDO coming into the marketplace. This is not science fiction anymore. These are true commercial applications that are rapidly spreading throughout the marketplace. But, more exciting, there are a number of dramatic wireless technologies on the way. We see creative uses OFDM, wideband CDMA, wi-max, ultra wideband, products that just a few years ago technologies very few had every heard of now beginning to work its way through the commercial system and beginning to produce real products for consumers. So the future is exciting, innovative and bright and we look forward to wireless as part of that solution.
The FCC has recognized for years now that spectrum is vital to realizing this vision and that it had to have a bolder, more enlightened national spectrum policy. And, from Day 1, we have been working very, very hard to change the traditional command and control approach that is not respective of innovation, not respective of the need to move spectrum to its highest and best uses and to work really, really hard to provide a spectrum policy that's much more facilitating of more platforms, more broadband platform, more innovation, more choice, more flexibility. Put simply, our view is that more spectrum more flexibility and more innovation will equal more broadband and a brighter information landscape and that's the core of our policy.
Just to mention a few of the big items that we've looked at and are looking at, Advanced Wireless Services, just last year the Commission allocated an additional 9 megahertz that can be used for Advanced Wireless Services, MDS and ITFS will begin working very, very hard to develop new rules that will provide less complicated and more flexible structures for MDS, ITFS band. We expect to release these rules sometime this summer.
The 70, 80, 90 gigahertz bands, the Commission has established innovative framework for allowing commercial use of spectrum in those bands. 24 gigahertz, the auction of spectrum license and the 24 gigahertz band that can be used to provide a range of fixed broadband services is going to begin on July 28th. We have promoted the use of secondary markets for people to have more commercial flexibility in obtaining spectrum and allocating spectrum.